I’m developing a custom Alexa skill and I am at the stage where I need to decide how to invoke my application with the most natural phrasing.

My application adds items that you specify to add to a third party ‘watchlist’ via an API. This works successfully.

Testing with ‘foo bar’ which I have configured as the invocation words.

I WANT to say “Add {item} to {foo bar}” using utterance ‘add {item} to’ but Alexa responds with “I couldn’t find a list called foo bar. Should I create one?”

I tried with ‘push {item} to’ and she responds “Sorry, I don’t know that one.”

I’m pulling my hair out trying to derive a suitable phrase, can anyone please advise how I can override ‘add’? I can’t use the words ‘watchlist’ or ‘list’ either, even though I’d also consider “Add {item} to {foo watchlist}” or something similar.

It only works with something like “Ask {foo bar} to add {item}”, which doesn’t sound very natural, is this as good as it gets?